Custom and Myth

Page: 21

This anecdote about Cronus was the stumbling-block of the orthodox
Greek, the jest of the sceptic, and the butt of the early Christian
controversialists. Found among Bushmen or Australians the narrative
might seem rather wild, but it astonishes us still more when it occurs
in the holy legends of Greece. Our explanation of its presence
there is simple enough. Like the erratic blocks in a modern plain,
like the flint-heads in a meadow, the story is a relic of a very distant
past. The glacial age left the boulders on the plain, the savage
tribes of long ago left the arrowheads, the period of savage fancy left
the story of Cronus and the rites of the fetich-stone. Similar
rites are still notoriously practised in the South Sea Islands, in Siberia,
in India and Africa and Melanesia, by savages. And by savages
similar tales are still told.

* * * * *

We cannot go much lower than the Bushmen, and among Bushman divine
myths is room for the ‘swallowing trick’ attributed to Cronus
by Hesiod. The chief divine character in Bushman myth is the Mantis
insect. His adopted daughter is the child of Kwai Hemm, a supernatural
character, ‘the all-devourer.’ The Mantis gets his
adopted daughter to call the swallower to his aid; but Kwai Hemm swallows
the Mantis, the god-insect. As Zeus made his own wife change herself
into an insect, for the convenience of swallowing her, there is not
much difference between Bushman and early Greek mythology. Kwai
Hemm is killed by a stratagem, and all the animals whom he has got outside
of, in a long and voracious career, troop forth from him alive and well,
like the swallowed gods from the maw of Cronus. {54a}
Now, story for story, the Bushman version is much less offensive than
that of Hesiod. But the Bushman story is just the sort of story
we expect from Bushmen, whereas the Hesiodic story is not at all the
kind of tale we look for from Greeks. The explanation is, that
the Greeks had advanced out of a savage state of mind and society, but
had retained their old myths, myths evolved in the savage stage, and
in harmony with that condition of fancy. Among the Kaffirs {54b}
we find the same ‘swallow-myth.’ The Igongqongqo swallows
all and sundry; a woman cuts the swallower with a knife, and ‘people
came out, and cattle, and dogs.’ In Australia, a god is
swallowed. As in the myth preserved by Aristophanes in the ‘Birds,’
the Australians believe that birds were the original gods, and the eagle,
especially, is a great creative power. The Moon was a mischievous
being, who walked about the world, doing what evil he could. One
day he swallowed the eagle-god. The wives of the eagle came up,
and the Moon asked them where he might find a well. They pointed
out a well, and, as he drank, they hit the Moon with a stone tomahawk,
and out flew the eagle. {54c}
This is oddly like Grimm’s tale of ‘The Wolf and the Kids.’
The wolf swallowed the kids, their mother cut a hole in the wolf, let
out the kids, stuffed the wolf with stones, and sewed him up again.
The wolf went to the well to drink, the weight of the stones pulled
him in, and he was drowned. Similar stories are common among the
Red Indians, and Mr. Im Thurn has found them in Guiana. How savages
all over the world got the idea that men and beasts could be swallowed
and disgorged alive, and why they fashioned the idea into a divine myth,
it is hard to say. Mr. Tylor, in ‘Primitive Culture,’
{55a} adds many
examples of the narrative. The Basutos have it; it occurs some
five times in Callaway’s ‘Zulu Nursery Tales.’
In Greenland the Eskimo have a shape of the incident, and we have all
heard of the escape of Jonah.